Archive for the ‘church’ tag
Week in Review: Weird Personality Types Edition
What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.
1. Continuing conflict over Creation: At the recent Ligonier Ministries national conference, Tough Questions Christians Face,Southen Baptist Seminary president Albert Mohler addressed the question, “Why does the Earth look so old?” (video) He challenged the position of Francis Collins, Karl Giberson, and the BioLogos Foundation that the Earth is billions of years old, which generated a series of responses from BioLogos, Glberson, and Peter Enns.
2. Looking for advise regarding the year after you’ve wrapped up your dissertation? Here’s some tips/reflections on My First Year (Stephanie M. Foote. Inside Higher Ed. 7/2/2010). Foote is now the director of the Academic Success Center and First-Year Experience at the University of South Carolina at Aiken.
3. Undergraduates are WEIRD: Are we getting closer to our understanding of human nature or further away from it when behavioral-science research focus upon undergraduates? That is the topic of Chronicle of Higher Education Perculator piece Why We’re All WEIRD ( 7/2/2010). Anyone willing to make an assertion?
4. In his personal blog Corner Interactions, physics professor W. Brian Lane asks a good question: what should a church leader believe about your discipline? What are the applications of those beliefs, and what should remain open issues?
5. PhDs and Myers-Briggs: Tim Keel shares a great quote from NT Wright about the effect of your Myer-Briggs type on the ease/difficulty of getting a PhD:
In Myers-Briggs terms, it’s much, much easier to get a PhD in biblical studies if you’re a ISTJ. You’ll never do it if you’re an ENFP because you’ll never finish it. You’ll be having too much fun. But we need, we need, we need “N”s in this business as well as “S”s because we need big-picture hypotheses. It’s very difficult to do that at PhD level because your supervisors and examiners will want you to nail down all the details (and you have to do that) but we need these big hypotheses.
It’s a very interesting post, so be sure to read the whole thing.
Teaching in the Church
Since 2003, I’ve volunteered as a teacher at my church. I’m currently teaching two series for adults – an introduction to the Bible (its nature, history, and content, the process of canonization and translation, basics of inductive Bible study) and a course on Christian “rituals and traditions” (the Lord’s Supper, baptism, Easter, Christmas, and Advent practices). My experience with teaching has always been positive, and my students (usually adults age 30 to 70) are genuinely curious about the Bible, Christianity, and the Gospel, but often don’t know where to start or how to find reliable sources of information. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of shady information about religion on the Internet.
On the other hand, if your full-time job involves classroom teaching and research, you might like something different on the weekend – something like, I don’t know, seeing your family or doing something more active. I’ve noticed very few elementary school teachers volunteering in our children’s wing.
Do you teach at your church? If yes, what has been your experience? If not, can you share your reasons and how they’ve been received? Do you feel free to make that choice at your church, or do you feel pressured one way or the other (either to teach or not to teach)?
